Into the Black

(A virtual room in NERV HQ)

This time, there wasn’t a single person in the virtual control room that wasn’t watching the stream. Someone had even brought a bucket of never-ending popcorn. But it was butterless and unsalted, so it sat on the table like an ornament, forgotten, while people passed around the plate of never-ending nachos.

One of those nachos fell out of Morgan’s mouth, forgotten, as they watched the ignominious end of the INS Nightingale. She wasn’t the only one surprised by the dramatic reversal. As one of the programmers eloquently put it: “HOLY SHIT!”

Turning to look at the equally flabbergasted Isaac, she said, “What the hell did he do? There’s no way a freighter should be able to take on a destroyer like that! Did you put unbalanced weapons in the game again?”

Isaac grimaced. “Look, I told you, the BFG 9000 was a joke! If you’d played some of the old games, you would get it!”

“YOU BLEW UP A MOON!”

“Yes, yes, you made your point. I took that gun out of the game. And I cleaned up the damage, anyways!” Isaac took a breath, and then said, “But to answer your question, no, the weapons he used are balanced. He just used them in ways we didn’t expect.”

“Didn’t expect?”

“Well, who else would be crazy enough to fly into Jupiter’s atmosphere, right into the fragging Red Spot, and then find the densest pocket of hydrogen he could, just to blow the thing sky high? If he hadn’t already been moving into that helium pocket, he could have gotten caught up in his own explosion!”

Morgan sighed. “Fine, what happened to the destroyer? I thought they could take a good bit of punishment?”

Isaac was typing on a virtual screen. “OK, according to the logs, the Captain of the destroyer must have noticed what our boy was doing at the last second. He ordered evasive maneuvers and a quick climb out of the atmosphere. Unfortunately, that meant they took the impact broadside, over their whole length.”

There was some more typing, as he expanded a certain section of the logs. “All right, seems that the ship was fine, up until the end. Lots of injuries, and some systems got knocked offline, but nothing that would have been fatal… Ooh, I see what happened. A tech was doing maintenance on the grav-plating in Engineering. Shouldn’t have caused a problem, but their hand slipped in the evasive maneuvers, and accidentally turned it up to almost 10g for two seconds, before getting dropped to 0g. That made a chair snap free, and hit the backup systems for the reactor like a bullet. When the primaries stuttered, because they were getting shaken up, the backups were offline. All it took was a bit of escaped antimatter, and boom. No more destroyer.”

Morgan shook her head, “So he just got a one in a million lucky shot?”

“Bigger odds than that. But he clearly was looking for the blast wave to throw the destroyer off their tail. They could have run during the blast, and jumped to lightspeed as soon as they cleared Jupiter’s atmosphere.”

One of the other game masters spoke up, “The whole thing would have been avoided if the destroyer had gone into the wave, instead of fighting it. Captain never dealt with surf before.”

Another one nodded, “Yeah, the destroyer captain is from Mars. No oceans there. If he went into the wave, he would have gotten damaged, maybe crippled, but his ship would have survived. Looking over his profile, his only combat experience was against pirates, and were mostly easy victories.”

Morgan leaned back in her chair, and groaned. “We’re going to have people trying to do this all over the place, aren’t we?”

Isaac shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. Most people aren’t that crazy. The ones who are mostly blow themselves up. But the ones like our boy there? They’re the kind of thing stories are written about. Just the idea that you can do crazy stunts like that in DAtS will draw people to the game, to see what else they can get up to.”

Morgan heard another GM whistle appreciatively, and turned back just in time to see their favorite Beta tester diving between the knelfi girl’s legs. She could only dumbly nod in response to Isaac’s statement, her eyes focusing on the screen.

Isaac blushed slightly, squirming in his chair, “Maybe I should sign up for DAtS myself. For research. Yeah. Research.”

She barely noticed herself agreeing, “Oh, yeah.” I wonder if Mirikon would let me research him?